Majority support Trudeau’s climate policy pitches made at COP26, poll suggests

Majority of respondents to an online survey by Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies support Canada's recent climate change announcements at COP26.

After Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made multiple policy announcements across the pond at the COP26 climate summit in Scotland, a new poll hints at how Canadians feel about those developments.

Sixty-nine per cent of respondents to an online survey by Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies say they support Canada’s announcement at the summit that it will cap and reduce pollution from the oil and gas sector toward net zero by 2050.

Some 65 per cent of respondents also say they support the government’s new policy to stop exporting coal by 2030, a move which would end the trade abroad of about 36 million tonnes of the resource, currently 60 per cent of what the country produces.

Sixty-one per cent also support Canada’s recent policy announcement that it will halt subsidies that assist oil and natural gas companies to run and grow their operations outside the country by the end of 2022.

The online survey of 1,565 Canadians cannot be assigned a margin of error because internet-based polls are not considered random samples.

Despite general agreement on these issues, Leger executive vice-president Christian Bourque says Canadians from fossil fuel-producing regions including Saskatchewan and Alberta tend to agree less on policies related to climate change because those changes directly affect their economies.

Meanwhile, respondents from Quebec led the other provinces in their support of Canada’s recent climate policy commitments, followed by British Columbia.

“In regions like B.C. or Quebec, we see that the level of agreement with reducing production and pollution is always higher because it doesn’t directly affect the economy,” said Bourque.